Forum Discussion
Find and Replace dialog box show weird characters
Hello,
Anyone who can help me fix these weird characters?
I'm regularly using one of our files via Excel in the browser (SharePoint) and today I noticed that when I type in the Find and Replace dialog box, it displays these weird characters. It does it job though, it still finds that word I'm looking for, it just shows different characters in the dialog box.
I wonder what's causing these?
16 Replies
- Do you all have Z@*.tmp files in "%TEMP%\acrord32_sbx\"
(ie "C:\Users\___???___\AppData\Local\Temp\acrord32_sbx\")
Turns out this is caused by 'odd' fonts used in PDFs. These special fonts are used to protect (obscure) the text in the PDF. The fonts have the letters and numbers at odd codepoints in the font and the encryption(?!) tool re-writes the text into the PDF using the remapped codepoints. Thus one can't copy&paste /search etc.
Somehow Edge is using that font.- Only 2 of my users should have that file. The other user has a computer that doesn't even have adobe reader on it to my knowledge.
- Are there Z@….tmp files in those folders?
One of my contacts at Microsoft has let me know "... they're rolling out a fix but I'm not sure when you'll see it"
I see it fixed Friday morning on my user's PC. As we know it was sometime took a bit to appear so hopefully its really gone.
We’re seeing the same. Re-built the PC (win 10). Edge still shows the issue.
Same user on a different PC (same AAD login) - good (so far)
Another Edge profile on first PC, different 365 user — BAD
Installed Chrome — occurs there too BAD.
Installed Firefox — doesn’t occur (so far).
Logged into the same PC as another (local) user. — good. (so far)
Also, using browser’s Dev tools, changed the font away from Arial, correct characters appear!
So, affects Edge and Chrome. Not seen in Firefox.
Only affects one user profile on one PC (so far) — reoccurred after a rebuilt.
Only affects Arial.I’ve put lots of “so far” because, as noted her by other folks, and we’ve seen, that the issue can take time to appear.
https://twitter.com/alanjmcf/status/1620790554337615872One of my contacts at Microsoft has let me know "... they're rolling out a fix but I'm not sure when you'll see it"
I see it fixed this morning on my user's PC. As we know it was sometime took a bit to appear so hopefully its really gone.
- What do you mean by "using browser’s Dev tools, changed the font away from Arial"? Where in the Dev tools are you changing that?
- It’s something that has to be done each time, so its only a test, not a fix.
See the video in my tweet https://twitter.com/alanjmcf/status/1620806678873780225?s=20&t=yMgC1JLlxXL5SOTDWpoeZg However note that one has to add the “font-family” line, I’d already added it when I recorded that.
- I've had 2 users affected by this issue. One one of my users, it just started out with the search, but then got worse and affected entire spreadsheets. Updates and clearing browsing data did nothing. Switching from Chrome to Edge resolved it for about 24 hours before it came back. This user had one of the older computers we are trying to phase out so I switched his computer for a new one and that only fixed it for a couple of days. Ended up seeing if desktop excel was affected and so far that proves to be a good workaround. My other user affected is still only affected by the Find text input.
- Same issue happening. If any fix found, please share.
I have fixed the issue for our client by forcing the latest Windows 11 Update H2 and then rebooting. The problem just went away. Very frustrating....
Same thing happening to me starting about a week ago. SkylB
